


Persistence of Vision

by aphelion_orion



Category: Togainu no Chi
Genre: M/M, Post-Game, Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-25
Updated: 2011-11-25
Packaged: 2017-10-26 12:52:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/283356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aphelion_orion/pseuds/aphelion_orion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rin seeks out Akira again, and confronts a few uncomfortable truths in the process.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Persistence of Vision

He's not quite sure what he was expecting.

Well, for one, he didn't expect to actually meet Akira, though he's been looking. He's been following false leads for so long in so many places and ending up nowhere, that he didn't think this would be it.

He thought Akira might be angry. He sure as hell would have been, if a guy took off to commit homicide and then failed to turn up for five years.

Five years.

If someone did that to him, Rin thinks, he'd kick their ass.

Akira tilts his head, wordlessly accepting the katana. A poor offering, maybe, but if he doesn't give it to Akira, then what the hell kind of use was there in hanging onto it in the first place? He's not sick enough—he hopes—to keep trophies. Perhaps a proper apology would be in order.

"Um. Would you like to go for a coffee or something? Maybe?"

He's never tried groveling before, but he's pretty sure there should be more to it than this. "I mean—"

"There's a place around the corner."

Akira slings the katana over his shoulder, a single, fluid motion as if he's been doing it all his life. He's forgotten that Akira is used to weapons. It all seems so far away, like looking at a faded picture, trying to retouch the colors and not quite managing the same result. The discrepancy between the Akira from all those years ago, hunted and tense and constantly fingering his dagger, and this new Akira, is astounding. He's looking so normal in his jeans and sneakers, the book bag resting against his side and the sword sheath on his back. He could be a college student, Rin thinks. A college student walking home from club practice. Somehow, it all seems so surreal.

"...Aren't you coming?"

Akira has turned back around, looking at him expectantly.

"Oh." He shakes his head, trying to dispel the illusion. "Oh yeah. Sure."

\----

The cell phone is a tiny, silver thing with a host of colorful straps attached—a fuzzy animal, a heart-shaped ornament studded with glittering stones, a pair of tiny handcuffs. They even open and close when you snap a hidden latch, and that's what he's been doing for the past few minutes, sucking iced coffee through a straw and playing with the phone straps. They don't suit Akira at all.

"They were gifts from coworkers," Akira says, his spoon drawing swirls in the cream. They're almost alone in the tiny street café, in that odd hour before people get off work, so there is nothing to focus on apart from each other. "I don't get the idea, but people become upset when I don't use them."

By people, he probably means girls. Rin can't imagine a guy giving these.

Taking the phone back, Akira places it on his side of the table again, thereby depriving Rin of things to fiddle with in a recently discovered bout of nervous twitchiness. He starts biting on the straw instead.

"You like working there, then?"

It's mumbled around a mouthful of latté, the kind of stupid small talk you make with strangers. Then again, they might as well be strangers. Joining arms in a struggle of life and death doesn't really give you a good measure of someone else's soul. Akira probably got to see more of his soul than the other way around, and that wasn't exactly pretty.

"It's... nice."

Rin suspects that any job where people don't try to stab you is nice, but if Akira cares enough about the feelings of his coworkers to keep their silly gifts, then it's probably a good place to be. Funny. He's having a hard time picturing Akira as a journalist. He never seemed to have enough to say to fill five minutes of conversation. But what does he know of Akira's aspirations? All he ever cared about were his own.

"I was... looking for you."

Not exactly apology, but he's trying.

"Hm."

"Wasn't easy, asking my way around. I was lucky enough to dig up the old man again." He smiles.

"Motomi helped me out," Akira says, shrugging. "I can't exactly go anywhere using my real identity."

There is that. People tend to be unhappy to have biological weapons shacking up in the neighborhood.

"So what do you go by now? Knowing the old man, he probably gave you a really awful alias."

There is a tiny smirk on Akira's lips as he leans across the table, his breath a warm puff against Rin's ear, and his eyes widen.

 _Kyou Ki_. Weapon.

"That _is_ awful! Don't tell me you accepted!"

"By the time I learned about it, he'd already finished the papers."

He glares. "Remind me to kick his ass next time I see him. That's really not funny."

"Oh, I don't know," Akira says, the rueful smirk still curling the corners of his mouth. "It kind of fits."

"It's terrible. You're not— this isn't— what the hell was he thinking?!"

"Why are you so upset about this? It's just a name." Akira is staring at him in absolute bewilderment, and he realizes with a start that he's been yelling, yelling about something like this, as if he had any say in what is happening in Akira's life. He flushes.

"Um. I mean..."

He's saved from fumbling his way through an explanation when the phone rings, Akira flipping back the screen to read the message.

"...I have to go," he says, pushing back from his chair. "The boss wants to discuss something."

"Hey! Wait a moment!" He almost ends up knocking over the drinks in his haste, the table rattling precariously. A part of him has to wonder where the smoothness has gone, the kind of flirtatious ease that he used like a knife, to cut others to the quick and give nothing of himself. "Will I see you again?"

Nope, not desperate at all.

Instead of a reply, Akira punches a button, holding the cell phone out to him to show a glowing line of numbers.

Rin smiles sheepishly, butterflies frantically beating their wings in his stomach, and he doesn't miss the irony that right now, he's more sixteen than he's ever been before. "Okay, now I'll have to cement my impression as a total loser and ask you for a piece of paper."

\----

The river is a kind of murky soup, green-brown and impenetrable, the big ships stirring waves as they plow past. Patches of a glistening film are floating here and there, probably some kind of waste oil. It's rather pretty in the sunlight, though, and there's a nice breeze coming from the other bank.

Rin is early, so there is little else to do apart from leaning against the stonewall, watching. Taking everything in.

The honking of cars. The shrill cries of some seagulls floating overhead. A couple of children are out, either skipping class or on their way back from school, tumbling over the spare patches of lawn by the waterfront. Everything looks so normal that the war might as well have been a dream. Everything seems like a dream, right down to his own existence, like everything he was up until now, the past twenty-one years of his life, were just a hazy kind of psychedelic vision, flashes of something that sometimes hurt and sometimes felt good, and now he has finally woken up to see the real world, the real things.

The rough stone against his back. The gravel staining the toes of his shoes. The smell of the city and the sunshine on his skin. The soft plastic slide of the negatives against his fingertips, the feeling of ditching work to be here, right in this spot, in a moment of irrational spontaneity, to wait.

A long time ago, someone told him that the hardest thing to let go of is yourself.

He no longer remembers who imparted that piece of wisdom to him—it might have been a random stranger, it might have been the old man, but back then he was sixteen (or fourteen, or ten) and too cocky or too young to understand. Rin thinks he might have been sixteen, because he remembers scoffing at that bit of philosophy and offending the speaker.

Angry, then.

Angry because he was sure the person was getting on his case about his brother—the old man, it was probably the old man, smoke curling around his fingertips and his voice a raspy murmur as he was gesturing with the cigarette—trying to tell him to let it go because revenge never got anyone anywhere.

He's no longer sure whether that truly was the case, but at the time, everything seemed to come back to Shiki, to his smirk and his taunts and the blood on the floor. At sixteen, he never thought about anything else, all that mattered was that revenge; to do as Shiki had done unto others, so that the angry spirits of the slain could find peace, so that Kazui wouldn't have to wander aimlessly as a specter, forever.

Rin pauses, holding a frame into the light, tiny negatives waiting to be developed, the sunbeams catching on blue and brown and yellow-white.

Negatives are inversions, mirrors of the real thing—half the truth, and now he can admit that the thought of the angry ghosts was as much an inversion as the negatives of photographs. It was him who was furious, who was scared to wander forever if he didn't do something, who was terrified of Shiki's cruelty and ashamed of that terror.

It's kind of strange how rationally he can spread these thoughts out right now, like a collage, to examine and analyze, when he never could before.

It was just easier to make himself believe in superstitions and chase his brother in their name; easier, and nobler, to claim to be doing this for his lover and his friends rather than for himself. He could make up an excuse, he knows, about needing to do these things in order to be able to go on, but he knows he doesn't have the right, especially not after Toshima. Not with his history of using people.

"You got here before me."

The voice startles him so badly he almost ends up dropping the frames, striking like a thunderbolt despite the fact that it's barely loud enough to be heard over the rolling traffic. Akira is eyeing him curiously, the kind of gaze that Rin always found indecipherable, and he finds himself struggling to form words, his brain still transitioning from then to now.

"I. Yeah. I kinda… got off early."

"Ah." Nothing in his voice to suggest that Akira sees anything odd about it, nothing to indicate that he's calculating time and distance and arriving at the conclusion that Rin barely went to work in the first place before coming here.

It's kind of ridiculous, really. He never stood around waiting for people, people stood around waiting for him, and if he felt like it, he skipped out, doing something else instead. Now that he's seeing the other side, he's glad Akira isn't like that.

"So, um. Wanna head for lunch or…?" He's not used to phrasing questions, either. He never asked, he demanded, and people were happy to oblige—Kazui, his friends, even Shiki, in his own odd way.

"I brought my own." Akira steps closer, placing a box of takoyaki on top of the wall, the kind of canteen-bought stuff with stickers and plastic foil covering.

"Oh." He didn't think about that, stupidly.

"You can have mine if you want to."

In another time, he wouldn't have cared. He would have taken Akira up on the offer without wasting a thought, but right now, it seems like a metaphor for most of the things he did in his life, and he doesn't like it one bit.

"Um, I'm not all that hungry." It's not even a lie, because the nervous flutters don't make him all that confident in lunch. "We can share?"

"Sure." Akira is propping up his elbows and gazing out at the water, and that leaves Rin to unwrap the chopsticks and peel back the foil, taking the first piece out and chewing. It's good to have something to do, to focus on balancing the slippery pieces of fried octopus instead of conversation, until half the box is gone.

Akira's gaze hasn't once strayed from the river, and he used to hate that—the way Akira could stare off into space, lost inside his own head. It made Rin turn into a brat, because he couldn't stand being ignored, having someone not look at him, not see him.

The takoyaki's turning cold. "Hm-hm."

It's odd, how he never noticed that Akira didn't startle when he was suddenly jumped, didn't flail or jerk away or anything someone who's all spaced-out would do, but he's noticing now, when Akira simply turns his face, taking the proffered takoyaki from between his chopsticks.

This would be the moment where Rin hands over the eating utensils and allows Akira to have his lunch in peace, without forcing him to ask for them back. He doesn't know what possessed him to not just do it in the first place, assuming a kind of familiarity that barely ever was there in the first place, a sense of closeness born from fear and longing. He should, by all means, at least have the grace to do it now, but there's still that part of him that enjoys probing, testing the boundaries to see how far he can go.

It's the part sitting right next to the one that enjoys the idea of feeding Akira way too much for a public setting.

So there goes another piece, and another, and another, Akira humoring him with a faintly bemused expression on his face, until Rin can't hold back a laugh at the sheer strangeness of it all. "This is so weird."

Akira has stopped chewing, food shoved into one cheek. "What is?"

"This. Me. You." He waves his hands to illustrate. "Everything. Being normal."

"Ah." A nod.

"Don't you think so?"

"Yeah."

Rin is toying with the remaining fried balls, pushing them from side to side. "Do you think… it'll ever stop being weird?"

Akira shrugs, "I'm not sure I'm the best person to ask," and Rin breaks into a slightly hysterical gigglefit from which he doesn't recover for quite some time.

Letting go, he decides, might not be so hard after all.

\----

Akira's apartment is tiny and cramped, very utilitarian. There are a couple of personal touches here and there, though—a picture, a rug, a mug with some kind of clever phrase emblazoned on the front. Rin's quite sure they were gifts, too, handed to him by well-meaning acquaintances in an attempt at inspiring some kind of domesticity in Akira.

It didn't work out too well, the items feeling rather lost in the Spartian space, but it's still strange to think that there should be other people allowed to leave their marks in Akira's pragmatic existence.

And now there's him, leaving his photo gear in the hallway corner and his jacket over the backrest of the sofa, and pitchers of lemonade in the fridge because the soda brand Akira buys tastes godawful.

It's kind of amazing, how these small things are starting to pile up.

He didn't expect to end up here so soon. Actually, he didn't expect to end up here at all, but it seemed dumb to invite someone who has no concept of relationships out on dates. Hell, he's not sure whether he has any concept of dating, isn't even sure whether people do this thing anymore, whether it isn't easier to say 'hi' and skip right to the main course because that's what dates are for, anyway.

Rin's never done anything except skipping to the main course, and he feels kind of guilty about that one, steamrolling someone who could barely formulate a sexual thought in his head.

Now it's walks when his leg is cooperating, or showing Akira his projects because Akira still sucks at carrying on a decent conversation, and microwaveable dinners unless he shoos Akira out of his own kitchen and goes hunting through the cabinets. It's so normal, so banal, as to be ridiculous. And so it doesn't seem out of place when he lets a plate slip back into the water one evening and touches Akira's wrist, suds, soap bubbles, and all.

"Hey. Hey, can I kiss you?"

The past few weeks, it seems, haven't made him any smoother, but he's the only one who minds.

"...Okay."

\----

 _"We shouldn't be doing this."_

 _Lips on his, fingers in his hair, his shirt, uncertain whether they want to pull him closer or push them away._

 _"You're protesting too much."_

 _Breathless, husky. He didn't know his own voice could sound like that. He figures he should be embarrassed, but can't bring himself to care. That is the goal he's been working towards for the past few months; he's had a lot of time to get used to the idea._

 _"I still think— your brother—"_

 _Punctuated by kisses, and he smiles, happy at the thought that he's making Kazui lose his cool._

 _"Forget about—mmm—that. What he doesn't know—"_

 _"Will kill_ me _."_

 _He laughs because it's so silly; Shiki will be mad when he finds out, because he's a control freak who doesn't like having his little brother where he can't see him, but all he'll have to do is be cute about it and the spat will be forgotten in a day or two. It's Shiki's own fault for ignoring him in the first place, spelunking around and then whipping up some kind of stupid embargo whenever it suits him._

 _"Not funny, Rin, so not funny."_

 _"Well, part of you doesn't seem to mind courting death," he says, and reaches down, and then there are no words for quite a while._

\-----

One of the very first things a human being learns, long before speaking or walking, is to adapt his sight.

The world projected onto the retinas, filtered through the lens, is an inversion, an upside-down image, and the mind has to learn how to deal with it, to twist it so that everything is set right again and nobody ends up walking into walls.

As a photographer, the idea that perception itself is an elaborate illusion has always been a source of fascination to him. He has read all about the experiments where they made people wear trick glasses and realized that after a time, the mind indeed switches the vision back around. After they removed the trick glasses, it took some time to return to normal again.

It's an experience he repeats entirely too often, sometimes even multiple times a day.

"Good morning," Akira mumbles around the foam and the toothbrush in his mouth, sleep-rumpled and half-dressed, but his eyes are so clear that Rin has to roll over and reply "Good morning" into the pillow.

His vision is going off-kilter again, replacing what's real with a trick image, an unwanted reflection, the shadow of a dead person with the same face. The rest of his mind is only too happy to help in crafting the mirage, pulling up the memory of sound, touch, scent. It's shameful and wrong, but he doesn't know how to stop it, so all he can do is turn away and hope that Akira doesn't notice. He notices the oddest things.

When Rin rolls over again, Akira is buttoning his jeans, toothbrush pushed to one corner of his mouth, his attention nowhere in particular. If it had been Kazui, he would have tossed a wet towel at Rin's head and told him to get his ass in gear, and Rin would have thrown a pillow and yelled about Kazui not being the boss of him, and it probably would have ended in sex.

"If you're quick about it, you might be able to trick the boiler into giving you some hot water," Akira says, pushing the toothbrush into his other cheek and combing his fingers through his hair.

They both know Rin won't be quick about it, wouldn't be quick about it even if he still had both legs to use, just so he could have something to whine about later. Akira never puts up with his complaints the way Kazui used to, simply finding nothing worthwhile in listening to another person bitch about the shower water, but Rin is kind of grateful that he never does. Kazui loved to indulge him, loved to spoil him, and he wouldn't have said, "If you're quick about it", he would have made a huge production about helping Rin out of bed and to the bathroom, asking about his leg all the while.

Akira leaves him alone to struggle in and out of the prosthesis, doesn't help him walk, doesn't reach out to catch him when he stumbles. Rin is grateful for that. Once upon a time, he wanted to be spoilt, but it never got him anywhere. He likes doing things on his own now, is surprised how much he likes it, and he doesn't feel comfortable with the idea of another person constantly—inadvertently—pointing his handicap out to him.

It would make him feel even more defenseless and clumsy than it already does, and, as stupidly vain as it sounds, ugly.

"Is there something on my face?"

Rin blinks, realizing that he's been staring at some indefinite point below Akira's chin, and shakes his head. "Just thinking."

"About what?"

It's funny, Rin thinks, how there can be such a discrepancy between a person's voice and their eyes. Akira's tone is casual, almost bored, but his gaze is sharp like shards of a glass bottle, alert and curious. It took him a while to get used to the fact that Akira's expressions work in different ways, to realize that behind that impassive face, there was something that could, and would, be hurt by certain things.

A sad excuse for his own selfishness, and he knows it—at the time, he wouldn't have cared, would have used Akira regardless, because he looked like Kazui and because he wanted something, was chasing something, wanted to punish Kazui for leaving him just like he wanted to punish his brother for being the cause. Akira was just unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

There's some kind of grand irony in there, that the people he uses end up falling in love with him, and he ends up falling in love with them, too. He's not sure whether that makes things better or worse. Part of him would feel better if Akira had told him off when they saw each other again, and the other part feels worse because all he's afraid of are the tricks of his own mind.

"You're spacing out today. Is something wrong?"

He shakes his head. "Nothing much. Just... I'm glad."

"Ah."

"Don't you want to know why I'm glad?"

"I figured you would say something if you wanted to share."

He snorts. "You haven't got a romantic bone in your body, you know that? Fine, I'll still tell you. I'm glad for you."

"Ah." Akira is mulling that over. "...We're out of coffee."

Rin quickly turns his face into the pillow again, desperately trying to smother his laughter.

\------

They were, indeed, out of coffee.

Putting away the groceries is always a bit of a balancing act because he has to stretch on tiptoe to reach the higher shelves, and the prosthesis doesn't like that. He's looking utterly ridiculous, steadying himself on the kitchen counter with one hand, putting most of his weight on his good leg, the other stretched out in a mockery of a ballet pose to keep from falling over, flailing around until he manages to push the can of coffee into the cupboard.

It's odd, how things like these can become a success.

Two more cans. They're going through the stuff like water, which is odd, because Akira doesn't drink that much and Rin doesn't even like it. He never did, used to drown his coffee in milk and sugar until there was no flavor left. The taste doesn't suit him.

It suited Shiki. His younger self would have called it a black brew for a man with a black soul, but he's not sixteen anymore and things have never been that easy. He's worked for so long to craft an image of his brother in his head until he was no longer his brother, but a monster, the grim reaper seeking to destroy all he touched, bringing ruin wherever he went.

He thought that killing that monster would bring relief, relief from the pain and relief from that hatred, so he could start thinking about his own life again. It did ease the hatred, but not in the way he thought it would, not in the way he wanted—it's like cracks that are starting to appear in an old photo frame, leaving the picture to hang in there crooked, spider web lines fracturing its wholeness.

There are things shining through now, half-forgotten, unexpected; things such as the fact that he used to _like_ the smell, used to like the way it mixed with the scent of leather, of Shiki's combat gear. Things like his own voice, childishly high, clamoring for a mug. Things like a knowing smirk when he tasted the coffee and almost spat it out in disgust.

He doesn't like these cracks because they remind him that his brother wasn't always a monster, and there was a time when he reveled in Shiki's power more than Shiki himself, used to pride himself on being the only person these hands would never harm, used to desire his brother's attention more than anything else in the world.

He shakes his head and turns on the tap, waiting until the water is icy cool to splash his face with it.

Now, years later, he's pretty sure what it was, or what it could have been if Shiki had been even the slightest bit more indulgent, and that scares him a little because it's a pretty messed-up way to feel.

\-----

 _" I want you to stop playing around."_

 _"It's not playing! We've got an awesome team going now, we can take on Igura, easily."_

 _"That's no place for you and your little friends."_

 _"Who are you to decide that, huh? You haven't even come to watch us fight!"_

 _"I don't need to. You don't have what it takes for Igura."_

 _"Again, how would_ you _know?!"_

 _He's yelling now, planting his fists against his hips and trying to puff himself up, which is really a pathetic endeavor because Shiki is taller than he will ever be. Even sitting down, lounging, carefully polishing the deadly blade, he seems larger than life. Rin doesn't even know why they're fighting. They've been over the same spiel so many times in the past few months, Shiki ordering him to quit, him doing the opposite._

 _"Why won't you just mind your own—!"_

 _There is nothing that invokes silence as quickly as a blade, a hair's breadth from his throat. He hasn't even seen Shiki move, but now he's towering over him, his eyes stone-cold and merciless. Suddenly, Rin has the tiniest inkling about what it would feel like to be an enemy soldier on the battlefield._

 _He swallows, and feels the sting, the tip of the katana cutting his skin._

 _"You would do well, little brother, to heed my advice just this once."_

 _The katana disappears, and so does Shiki, vanishing out the door with a flutter of his coat. It takes him a while to realize that his knees are shaking, and a while longer to get them to stop._

 _In the end, he doesn't tell Kazui, just like he hasn't told him about all the other times they've had this conversation. A week later, Pesca Corsica wins the finals, the last test of strength before Igura._

 _Two days after his triumphant announcement to his brother, he's kneeling on the floor of their meeting den, Kazui's blood seeping into the cracks of the floorboards and soaking his stockings, the very same merciless shadow vanishing out the door._

\-----

In some ways, being with Akira is like being with a blind man. He never thought such people existed, with zero social skills to call their own, no concept of the rituals, the little things. Getting him to say "I'm back" took weeks, as did "Good night", and there's still that little jump of his muscles when Rin catches his hand on a whim, that bemused look on his face when Rin worms his way into the crook of his arm. Everything about him is quiet and pragmatic, nothing unnecessary, a study in simplicity.

"Mmm. That was nice."

He squirms a little, relishing the pleasant tingles, the roughness of Akira's jeans against his thighs, the ragged breathing against the nape of his neck. There's no reply, but after a while, the hand on the small of his back starts to move, brushing upward and sideward, loosening the damp shirt sticking to his skin. It's not the kind of aftermath he's used to; there are no whispered praises, no tender kisses, nothing romantic or explicitly erotic. Instead, he gets Akira's hand, wandering up and down his sides, curious, exploratory, almost bewildered. Rin has never tried to interfere with that, likes the thought of being something to discover, something to be mapped.

He squirms again, this time to keep his balance. Having sex in a chair is really a lot more difficult than most people think, and his bad leg is cramping up from the strain. The moment is too nice not to put up with it, though.

"We should get up," he mumbles, lips brushing Akira's shoulder and feeling the fine hair there standing on end, bristling against his mouth.

The hand pauses. "Yeah."

"Whoa, hey!" Grabbing onto Akira's neck is the only way to keep himself from landing on the floor.

"...I thought you wanted to get up."

"That's just something people say. You're supposed to disagree!"

Akira blinks. "Sometimes, it's better to say what you mean."

The words have something going for them, Rin decides. He's never quite sure how much interpretative work is supposed to go into Akira's statements, whether that means he's upset about being made to respond to lines from a script he never saw as useful, or whether it's some kind of philosophical comment, but chances are it's just typical Akira honesty.

"Alright, then, let me rephrase. We _should_ get up but I really don't want to, and if you're up for it, I'd be more than happy to go for another round in a bit."

"Okay."

The tone is so flat and even that Rin can't help himself, bursting into giggles and laughing until his stomach hurts, because Akira is perhaps the only man on the planet to respond to the offer of sex with anything but aggressive enthusiasm. When he pulls away, wiping tears of mirth from his eyes, Akira is wearing a mildly put-upon expression.

"You really have ways of making a guy feel appreciated, you know that?"

"I thought the entire point of sex was that it didn't require so many words."

He's almost, almost sure that Akira is making fun of him. "...Point."

The rest of the afternoon is spent not talking.

\---

Over the years, he's managed to acquire an impressive collection of cameras. Part of it comes with the job, and part of it, as one of his employers said after he hounded him into paying for a special photo lens, comes with being anal-retentive. There's no single camera that is good for every shoot; so much depends on the light and the angle and the subject you're trying to capture, and it's hard to explain that to a boss when they just don't see what a picture is lacking.

At least he can justify the expenses by taking good care of them, taking them apart and cleaning the lenses, checking the shutters, brushing dust off the film transporter. There's only one camera he rarely touches, because he has to be ready for it.

He used to carry it everywhere, snapping and erasing pictures as he liked, until erasing meant destroying the last few happy memories he had of Kazui, of the team. He used to go through them every day, sometimes more than once, reminding himself that he had a mission, a goal, something to live for, something to do so it wouldn't seem so horribly sad that all that should be left of them was a memory unit as big as his thumbnail, and nothing else.

At sixteen, he never noticed how swiftly memory changes, that the harder he looked at the pictures, the less substance there seemed to be to them, his mind beginning to forget, to supply things that didn't happen in order to fill the gaps and cover up the blunder. He's no longer sure in which bar that shot was taken, or how exactly he ended up sprawled across Kazui's lap in the other, or which tournament it was that had them all posing like lunatics. Flicking through them, his mind is offering only tentative suggestions, but no answers.

Another click jumps two years ahead, several pictures of the old man, one or two of Toshima, and... he stops. He remembers that one perfectly, grabbing two strangers by the arm and taking a shot, because one looked so much like Kazui he might as well have been his twin, and the other was wonderfully easy to startle.

Slowly, he rises from the desk, leaving the dismantled cameras and shuffling out of the room.

He's not sure why he never thought of that picture before, never thought to offer it as a memento. It would be easy to say that he simply forgot it was there, but Rin doesn't trust himself too well—he knows he can be a petty, small person. This is hardly the first time he has wronged Akira, purely for his own selfish reasons.

Akira is sitting on the balcony in a patch of sunshine, the wind ruffling his hair and the papers in his lap. He still hasn't gotten used to the thought of Akira as a journalist. Some people suddenly turn verbose when they're writing, but Akira's articles are no different from the way he speaks, factual, unromantic, and straight to the point.

"Hey," he says, holding out the camera for Akira to take. "I've got something I thought you'd like to have."

Akira gazes at the picture on the display for a good long while, before shaking his head. "No."

"But... you don't have any pictures, so I thought..."

"I keep my memories inside. That's where they're needed."

There should be something to say to that, some kind of "what if" question to ask, but he already knows that it won't change Akira's mind. Sometimes, he wonders with no small amount of envy, how someone can live this way, so quiet and unfazed, confident in the idea that he won't need a reminder.

But who knows? He's spent so long hanging onto the tattered remnants of his past, clinging to ghosts and fragments of happiness, but now he's no longer sure where it's gotten him. At the time, it helped him to survive, using the good things to fuel his anger and face the bad things, but what else is there?

"I wish I could be a stronger person."

Akira closes his notebook, looking at him thoughtfully. "For what it's worth... I think you already are."

\---

 _"Shiki?"_

 _The room is dim, the blends drawn, and a little stuffy, his brother a shadow among shadows against the wall. If he's been sleeping, he most certainly isn't sleeping now, has probably not been asleep since Rin left his room to tiptoe out into the corridor. It's impossible to sneak anything past him these days, awake and alert as he is at every wayward noise. Sometimes, he disappears for days on end, not telling Rin where he's going, where he's been, or when he'll be back. The katana never leaves his side._

 _"Shiki?"_

 _No reply, but the shadow shifts slightly to the soft rustling of cloth. His brother always sleeps sitting up these days. "I can't sleep."_

 _"So don't."_

 _"But I want to."_

 _"How is this my problem again, brat?"_

 _"I wanna sleep here."_

 _"Get lost."_

 _"Okay."_

 _A scuffle ensues as he's trying to wedge himself between Shiki and the wall, and at one point, Shiki even grabs him by the scruff and tosses him across the room, but it's an old move, and Rin just lands on his feet. It's a token struggle, anyway—it ends up with his win, returning to his chosen place and promptly snatching most of the covers. Shiki never sleeps under them, anyway._

 _"Don't blame me if I kill you in the middle of the night."_

 _"Okay."_

 _If he were older, he would understand better, would realize that his brother is acting oddly, has been different ever since the end of the war—more closed off, more abrupt, a hard glint in his eyes. He's just twelve, though, and only thinks about his brother in relation to himself, so he finds nothing odd about the way Shiki twitches when he grabs a hold of his sword arm, uncaring of the faint smell of blood._

\----

Sleep is slow to come to him that night, his mind still stuck on Akira's words. Lying in the darkness, he's flipping through the photos again, the tiny screen casting a rectangle of light on his side of the bed.

Photographs and memories used to be one and the same to him, physical and unalterable, but now he knows better. They are mnemonics, small, fleeting moments burned onto film to help the mind remember. He used them to remember anger and grief, to drive his hatred to new heights because back then, it was all that kept him from crumbling.

Searching, his fingers find the button, a tiny nub to be pressed with the tip of a nail or a pencil in order to prevent accidents. There is so much these pictures have done for him, but they can only carry him so far. He doesn't think that Akira is right, that he truly has become a stronger person, but he thinks he might be able to try, to become a little worthier of that opinion.

He presses down, and the little status bar comes up, the pictures disappearing from the screen one by one, until there is only a blinking message left.

 _Ready_.

  
\----

\- FIN -

**Author's Note:**

> My first time experimenting with Rin's voice. He's kind of a hard character to grasp because he has two sides—the cheerful, brattish one he shows to others, and the one that he keeps hidden inside. Just like with Keisuke's ending, the game shows a pretty big leap, and I wanted to explore Rin's conflict and attempt to start anew in more detail than that.


End file.
